Brainstorm

The N900 comes with a generic image viewer that does a decent job for many use cases. Some scenarios are not well covered, though:

Because of the N900s high resolution, photos smaller than 800x480 (usually received by mail, bluetooth or MMS) don't use the full physical display size, which makes them less pleasant to view than would be possible. Also, when attached to a TV via TV-out cable, the display doesn't adapt to the aspect ratio/size of the TV set (which is technically possible; the Media Player plays 4:3-videos full screen on a 4:3 TV set).

So we have two use cases that need improvement:

1) George uses the N900 to show photos of his children to his parents. Some of the photos he took himself with the N900, others were taken by his wife and got re-sized to 352×288 (CIF-format) before they ended up on the N900. George's parents have a hard time viewing these small 352x288-pictures on the 3.5" screen. They think there's something wrong with the N900 because it shows some pictures full-size, while others appear to be scaled down.

2) As his parents get tired of the tiny photos, George uses TV-out and connects the N900 to the TV in the kitchen. Again, none of the photos he shows uses the full display size. There's black borders on the top and on the bottom because the N900's aspect ratio is different from the 4:3 aspect ratio on the kitchen TV. Annoyingly, the black borders are visible even if the image shown is 4:3.

Both of these problems make for an inconsistent and sometimes very disappointing user experience.

Solutions for this brainstorm

Solution #1: Implement in default image viewer

When in full screen mode (no controls shown), the default image viewer that comes pre-installed on the N900 should

treat anything that's CIF (352×288) or larger as a photo and scale it to full screen size, preserving the aspect ratio.

act like the default Media Player does when TV-out cable is attached: The aspect ratio of the video signal is not determinded by the aspect ratio of the N900's desktop, but by the aspect ratio of the image shown. The image is scaled up so it fills the TV screen.

Pro

This would avoid re-inventing the wheel for all the other features already present (tags, slideshow,...). It would give all users access to the enhanced features proposed here. Also, it was already implemented this way (except TV-out, of course) in Maemo 4 and worked very well there.

Con

Even though the "larger than CIF"-requirement should filter that out, there may still be corner cases of images that are not photos (but logos, icons, scanned text,...) and therefore should not be scaled. Another corner case is when you have 2 version of the same image that only differ in size and want to know which is safe to send via email: You couldn't tell because they all look the same.A more practical "Con" is the fact that Nokia commented negatively on this enhancement request (though they never officially WONTFIXed it and WONTFIXed it 2 days after this brainstorm was opened).

Solution #3: Use Eye Of Gnome as a new image viewer

Eye of Gnome (EOG) is a simple image viewer from the desktop world that performs most of the tasks we need, except for the TV-out of course. It scales up images in full screen mode; it supports slideshows; it has a neat preview area for browsing through folders; it can rotate images. (Rotation independent of the device orientation may be a nice extra feature, especially if images are shown on TV.)

Work on a Fremantle-port of EOG was done in summer 2009 and reached a useable state. See this blog post, which also includes a video. As far as I can tell, though, the effort stopped in September 2009. I don't see EOG in a repository. (Code is here)

A little UI-polish and the addition of Maemo-specific code for TV-out could make EOG the photo viewer needed to solve the problem.

Pro

EOG is an independent project; Nokias decisions about features and user interfaces won't affect it. EOG is available and tested for Fremantle and would probably need relatively little effort.

Con

It's a third party application, users won't get the enhanced experience out of the box. Using EOG would probably (?) also mean losing some of the functionality the Nokia image viewer offers (like filter by tags etc.) or having to re-write it.